Report Claims iPad 2 Shipping by End of February

Take this with a grain of salt, but a new report out of Taiwan claims that a second-generation iPad will start shipping by the end of February and not April as many of us are expecting.

DigiTimes is reporting that Hon Hai Precision Industry division Foxconn Electronics has been notified by Apple that the iPad 2 will ship within 100 days from their Shenzhen, China plants. According to component makers based in Taiwan, initial shipments of the second-generation tablet are expected to reach 400,000 to 600,000 units. But big surprise: Foxconn declined to comment.

“The sources pointed out that the iPad 2 will ship as soon as the end of February in 2011,” the report claimed on Tuesday. “Apple originally planned to start mass production in January, but because the device's firmware is currently still in testing, Apple has been postponing the schedule. Since Foxconn's new plants in Chengdu are still in pilot production, iPad 2 will be mainly supplied by its Shenzhen plants, while the company's upstream component partners have all been notified of the shipments schedule.”

However, many are skeptical about the February ship date -- Apple is fairly rigid about its mobile device release schedules, historically releasing new iPhones in June and new iPods in September. The first-generation iPad was released in April of this year, so many are expecting Cupertino to ship an iPad 2 around the same time next year.

DigiTimes notes that Foxconn has shipped “about six million iPads in the third quarter of 2010, meaning there are about 1.8 million units of inventory left for the fourth quarter.” Their sources forecast that Apple will continue to order new units through January, but will reduce volume in February to allow existing inventory to stretch into the end of March, creating overlap with the second-generation model.